[…] I’ve selected five news readers to talk about today: NetNewsWire, Vienna, Shrook, Safari and Newsfire. There are of course many more like RSS Owl, Pulp Fiction, NewsMacPro and NewsFan but I’ve chosen these five for review based upon a combination of their simplicity, ease of use, prettiness and price. First: NetNewsWire NetNewsWire is the 800 pound gorilla of desktop news readers. At one point in 2005 FeedBurner reported it was the most popular reader on any platform, Mac or PC. It’s simple interface and abundant features make it a real workhorse and the reader of choice for such productivity-savvy individuals as Merlin Mann and Walt Mossberg. Some of the stand out features that I find useful in NetNewsWire are smart folders, integration with Del.icio.us, and compatibility with Automator and Applescript. I like being able to include NetNewsWire in my workflows, and it’s really nice to be able to throw together a smart folder that contains all the news items from local sources that contain information about crime in my neighborhood, or this time of year, to automatically collect all the news that makes reference to WWDC. […]

I’d like to point out that anybody using NetNewsWire 1.x should really upgrade to the public beta of NetNewsWire 2. It’s fantastic.

Oh, and here’s another tip. You can set the custom refresh for folders, and any children of the folders inherit that custom refresh as their default refresh (you can obviously set a custom refresh for them that’s different). That’s quite useful. For instance, when I was testing out podcasting (I eventually stopped, since I rarely ever listened to them, since I don’t have a commute), I set the Podcasts folder to refresh every 24 hours, since no podcasts (that I know of) come out with more than one a day (and most are less often). This way whenever I added a new podcast, it would default to refreshing once a day rather than once every hour.

I’d also like to mention tuning refreshes with the bandwidth stats window. A while ago I set my default refresh to every hour, then waited a day, then opened up my bandwidth stats window and found all the feeds that either didn’t use gzip or didn’t use 304 responses and made them refresh less often. Then I found the ones that did do that and, depending on the feed, made them refresh more often. Of course, I took update schedule as a factor in this. MacUpdate gets refreshed every half hour, because it’s always adding new stuff. Same for Fark and BoingBoing. But, for example, ChiperBlog (the blog of one of my friends) gets updated every 6 hours, because he often goes for days or weeks between posts (and 6 hours is a reasonable compromise between once a day, which is more economical, and every hour, which lets me see the post sooner after it goes up).

I tried using NetNewsWire Lite for a while, but found it lacking in features (which the non-lite version may well have). Then I stumbled across NewsPipe[1], which is a Python script that mails you all new items in your feed list (which is an OPML file like NNW exports). You lose NNW’s feed management features, but you win all the benefits of having the news in your mail client. Plus it’s one application less in the Dock.

Good comment, KB, and a great catch.

I’m using the 2 beta myself, so can folks on 1.X in full or lite version illuminate whether the feature I so cavalierly reference is available in those versions. :)

tia.

I prefer Sage myself. Not a lot of options (manual refresh only), but I don’t have to leave the browser :)

Netnewswire Lite does not seem allow one to adjust the size of the type for subscription feeds (the names of the subscription on the left panel). The existing typesize is pretty small for aging eyes. Does anyone know of a way to adjust this?

Are you using 1.x or 2.0 beta? NetNewsWire 2.0 beta (dunno about Lite) lets you change the font used there (and the size as well).

In both NNW 2b and NNW Lite, you can change the font size from the preferences (in Lite it is under “HTML” and in 2b “appearance”). It would be nice, though, if the News Items display font would respond to cmd+ and cmd- the way web pages do.

One of the coolest things about NNW 2b is that if you quit when you’ve got a zillion tabs open (which is an easy thing to do accidentally when cmd+w is right next to cmd+q), they’ll all reappear and reload when you next launch. Wish Safari did that. Also, have you seen the del.icio.us script? It lets you post the current News Item from the Apple Script menu.

I’ve been using NNW 2b a ton and I really like it (I even paid for it), but my question is: Do you think you’ll still be using it after Safari RSS is on the scene? (If you think talking about this here would be hijacking the original topic too badly, we can move over to my place I recently posted on NNW 2b, too.)

I am using NetNewsLite 2.0b23. As far as I can figure, changing the type preferences only changes the size of article titles (right panel) and article text. It does not change the size of Subscription Name (i.e. BBC News, New York Times, etc) which is the left panel. Thanks for any advice.

So what are the feeds y’all find essential for RSS? I use VersionTracker and MacUpdate, of course. I’m prolly going to add this just as soon as I figure out how. What else should I be checking out?

I’m a big fan of NewsFire. Works like NetNewsWire, only it’s much cooler looking. And isn’t that why I use a Mac, for the cool look and “dynamic user experience”?

Nope, no custom refresh on Lite 2.0 beta. Oh well.

NewsFire looked neat, but I couldn’t wrap my head around the keyboard shortcuts. I’m not touching the mouse for news. :-)

Also, if it’s not clear already, I do really recommend Mac users consider having a look at NewNewsWire or it’s freeware little brother, NetNewsWire Lite.

Umm, shouldn’t it be NetNewsWire and not NewNewsWire?

Since we’re partly on the subject of distraction by RSS feeds, NNW outperforms Newsfire with its dock access alone. Not only can you see the number of new/unread feeds, you can skim them and mark them as read from the dock - no switching apps here! Now that I can use different refresh intervals, I see RSS becoming more and more integrated in my workflow - instead of being a sympathetic informative distraction.

I recently switched to back to Mac from WinXP. One thing I really found lacking was full featured RSS readers. Then I came across NNW and suddenly all was right with the world again.

I’m using NNW lite, and could do with getting a full version because I really miss the ability to individually schedule refreshes - I read about 50 RSS feeds daily. On Windows SharpReader is just about the ultimate in RSS readers, and it’s free. Compared to SharpReader most other programs are lacking, but NNW gets really close. It would be nice if you could open pages in the reading pane, and for some reason NNW doesn’t pull in Craigslist items - I have to go into Safari to read the listings, but other than that I like the program.

I gotta give another shout out to NewsFire. I switched from NetNewsWire several months ago and have never once regretted it. And you can set different refresh times for individual feeds, just like in NetNewsWire (but you can set them in style).

For those of you who liked NewsFire but want a similar free version try http://www.js8media.com/Products_MiNews.html. MiNews is pretty and seems to have as much power as NetNews Lite. It is donationware.

NNW is still claiming on their site that their 2.0 beta is filled with bugs. Anyone found this to be true? Also, can’t one use the 2.0 version of NNW for downloading podcasts as well?

I like NetNewsWire, but not the price tag. My RSS reader of choice is RSS menu. It’s simple and free, with the great config settings you talked about in NetNewsWire.

Time for a trim

[…] So, yeah, I’m thinking about adding a few feeds back to my reader, but you can bet I’m going to tweak the hell out of the refresh settings. Now that I’ve been away from it for a few weeks, I have to say: there are an astonishing number of things in the world that I don’t need hourly updates about. Daily, weekly, even monthly status reports provide more than enough information about a lot of change. […]